The use of indicator boards or plates as information retention aids and educational aids is well known. U.S. Pat. Nos. 208,780; 400,345; 415,105; 1,400,887; 1,406,592; 1,520,648 and 1,573,358 are examples thereof.
Boards of this general type are known where manually placeable indicators or tokens are held to the board by magnetic attraction. U.S. Pat. Nos. 1,168,949; 1,735,883; 2,722,754; 3,010,228; 3,224,128; 3,496,653 and 3,726,026 are examples.
U.S. Pat. No. 3,823,491 discloses a teaching aid of this latter type wherein a notebook cover is constructed of a laminate comprising a magnetic sheet or foil and an overlay with pronunciation aiding caricatures thereon. A similarly constructed lap board is also shown in FIG. 6. Ring-like markers (FIG. 7) are placed on the cover overlay so that phonic representations are observable through the marker holes to assist the student in correlating written and spoken words.
While devices of this prior art type are satisfactory for their intended purpose, they do not lend themselves to use by individuals having speech and/or writing handicaps as a means of communicating complex thought messages to other individuals.
More specifically, the prior art does not teach a method or an apparatus suitable for use by an individual with at least a serious speech handicap to communicate with others. This inadequacy is overcome by the present invention which makes it possible for an individual to use a plurality of numbered tokens to select a plurality of short message segments which, when read in the indicated sequence, communicate a complex message made up of said plurality of short message segments.